Onlife

Onlife #15

GameSpy: Is undoing the damage that this period of silence caused one of the major challenges of your role at IGE?

SS: Yes. Some of the key challenges I have are to normalize our business relationships with publishers, and to get the positive and truthful messages out regarding IGE's operations, and also, just revealing to gamers and the industry the size of the secondary market, and as well as the sheer number of players that use it to increase their enjoyment of the games.

GameSpy: In my experience with Final Fantasy XI during the period you mentioned, IGE became synonymous with "gil sellers," and the sorts of annoying practices that gil farmers engaged in.

SS: Our name is becoming a verb, and that is both good and bad. The repositioning that I have to do is that I have to speak with industry professionals such as yourself at every opportunity and explain what we think is important. We see ourselves as the leading services provider to the industry. IGE was founded by avid gamers, and I have high-level characters -- multiple high-level characters -- in multiple games. I think that's highly unusual for an executive in the games industry, from my experience. I understand the gamer's perspective, and I know how active my guilds are in trading characters, accounts, and items in all of the games where I participate. This is one of the reasons that I felt I could make a difference here at IGE.

I think that people behave in cyberspace exactly the same way they behave in the real world. If you look at modern society today, you see political structure, you see commerce, you see people working really hard to improve their wealth, and their quality of life. It doesn't surprise me that you see the same thing in MMOs. You go online and you see political structures -- you call them alliances and groups. You see commerce, which is a very fundamental aspect of most games. And one of the biggest sources of enjoyment in an MMO is the aggregation of in-game wealth. You know, getting more stuff, having better stuff.

According to Salyer, hardcore gamers use services like IGE to acquire the most cost-prohibitive items in the games -- like housing.

GameSpy: That's one of the dominant design elements of these games, and largely, that is what keeps many of us playing -- the desire to get that next hot piece of gear.

SS: You're right, but you know what? In none of the games that I play is there a single piece of equipment that drops anywhere that improves your stats and attributes enough so that you have an unfair advantage over other players. The age old argument that the secondary market is cheating because it gives [rich] players an unfair advantage doesn't really speak to the truth. The truth is that most of the game currency that people buy from us is used in ways that are not player-versus-player. People get currency to buy houses, to buy mounts, and yes, to buy armor and swords, but more often, it's used for things like leveling up crafting skills. You know, crafting is fun, but killing rats to gain the components to level your crafting skills is not fun.

When I say that most of the hardcore gamers that utilize our service, I mean that they use it because they want to do what they want to do. They want to spend their time crafting and increasing their skills, rather than farming to gather gold and components so that they can then go and craft.

That's it for this installment. Of course, Mr. Salyer and myself had quite a bit more to talk about. Tune in next time for the conclusion of our interview!